Leonardo DiCaprio Weighs in on The Wolf of Wall Street Morality Debate

In theaters less than a week, The Wolf of Wall Streetcan already claim a handful of things: a respectable $34 million domestic gross. The most brilliant comedic performance of Leonardo DiCaprio’s career. And the successful launch of a hot-topic debate about whether Martin Scorsese’s latest criminal epic tips the morality scale from depicting a surreal hedonistic lifestyle to glorifying it. Critics have mostly come out on the side of the epic film, adapted from Jordan Belfort’s memoir, being a masterpiece—with the New Yorkerfavorably comparing the viewing experience to “mainlining cinema for three hours.” The detractors, meanwhile, argue that Scorsese pays too little attention to the true victims of Belfort’s greed, who were conned out of hundreds of millions of dollars.

And now, as awards season heats up and The Wolf of Wall Street settles into the multiplex, DiCaprio has submitted to several interviews during which he weighs in on the controversy, and explains what the filmmakers were thinking when they chose to focus on Belfort’s hedonistic hijinks rather than on the lives of those he ruined.

Aside from not wanting to “take a traditional approach to the film,” DiCaprio, who also produced the movie, tells Deadline’s Mike Fleming that he, Scorsese, and screenwriter Terence Winter were very deliberate in their decision to detail the ridiculousness of Belfort’s illicit lifestyle.

“We very consciously wanted this to be an analysis of the temptation and intoxication of the world of money and indulgence and hedonism. We wanted to take the audience on that journey, and so we don’t ever see the wake of that destruction until the very end, where they implode. It was a very conscious decision on our part, so the experience would be almost like taking a drug. To me, if you’re an audience member, you want to be completely submerged in the actual film. We wanted it to be from these peoples’ perspective, an understanding of the very nature of who these people are, and why this can be so intoxicating and so exciting for them. By no means is this film a glorification or some sort of promotion of this lifestyle and those who say it is are missing the point entirely. These people are what they are and we didn’t want to give them any false sense of sympathy.

To the Los Angeles Times, DiCaprio added, “If a movie can give you a greater understanding of our darker nature—whether you agree with it or not—that’s the best thing a film can be to me.

As for Scorsese’s take on the whole affair, DiCaprio does his best to sum up the director’s own motivations for the polarizing portrait he paints. “Marty said to me, ‘I’ve done many movies like this. I don’t want to pass judgment on these people. I want to show them for what they are.’ If you look at Goodfellas, there is an attractiveness to that lifestyle, but it’s never condoning that behavior.”